Invictus Guild Summit: Selling into Enterprises

This is something that hopefully is a natural continuation of some of the former summits that we’ve had that I’ve attended, that I see Eric on the call as well. We’ve talked a lot about go- to- market motions.

And one of the things that I would say has been the biggest inflection point for teams that I’ve been involved largely through M& A, companies with say 10, 20 million in reoccurring revenue that are looking to make that next step is building out an enterprise team and making sure that you are not breaking the frameworks in which you’ve worked hard to build to get to where you’ve got to at that 20 million in reoccurring or 10 million in reoccurring revenue.

And one of the biggest misconceptions that I’ve seen is this notion of, well, let’s go and hire an enterprise seller. A seasoned person has a great resume and we’ll just point them in the direction of the enterprise, selling large, multi six- figure, seven- figure deals. And we’ll just carry on operating. We have our transactional revenue, our inbound revenue. And then six months in, that enterprise seller has sold nothing. 12 months in, that enterprise seller isn’t, and he’s a costly hire, is not delivering the revenue that was expected.

And then there’s a natural breakdown of why. And a lot of it, in my experience, comes down to this notion of there’s no one size fits all for enterprise. Enterprise is gonna be unique to all of your respective businesses. I think it’s ever- changing. I think the definition of enterprise, and I’ll get into this shortly, is different from business to business. There’s no shared definition. But I think one thing that I’ve seen in all of this is in order to truly effectively enter into enterprise selling, you need buy- in across your entire organization.

So that’s just as much a financial consideration as it is a product consideration, customer success consideration. And so hopefully over the next 30 minutes, I’ll try not to go the hour on this so we can have some back and forth with questions. But I wanna shine a light on a number of the factors that have gone into enterprise teams that I’ve been standing up within S& P Global, which were a data and fintech provider in the market today. And also some of the pitfalls of entering enterprise altogether.

And I think in any decisions that you’re making, I assume we’re all in planning mode. It’s the start of the year, certainly is for me. You have limited resources and you’re tasked with hitting these stretch revenue goals. And so misallocating resources, not just commercially, but across your organization can have a big impact. And ultimately the enterprise can be a distraction. So I’m not trying to dissuade anyone from going full force into enterprise, but I do wanna shine a light into the considerations.

So for those that don’t know who I am, I’ve had the fortune of meeting many of you, but for those that I’m newly introducing myself to, I came by way of the Guild about a year and a half ago and technically I’m tied to fund two. But it’s been great to meet and work with many of you over the past year and a half. My background is in leading sales organizations, both account management and sales.

I was born in the UK, but my entire career has actually been here in the US. And I’ve exclusively been in data as a service, so DAS as we call it, as well as SaaS businesses. So technology working within technology verticals within information providers, or within the financial industry. And I’ve been fortunate that while I haven’t had the benefit of working at a startup, scaling and exiting, I’ve been on the other end of this, which is acquiring, being a part of.

M& A, largely at S& P, where we’ve actually been the exit partner, and I’ve been heavily involved in commercial integration. So this notion of standing up enterprise, go- to- market teams, motions, that’s something that I’ve been doing on an annual basis as we continue to make acquisitions. And the latest acquisition for S& P is with Intelligence. And for those that are in the private markets, Prequin is a leader in private market data. They got acquired by BlackRock. We made a subsequent acquisition of with Intelligence, which is a competitor.

They have 80 million in recurring revenue. And we’re doing this exact exercise as we enter Q1, standing up an enterprise team within with Intelligence. So excited to talk to you all today, and I will make sure that I pause for questions as we go. When I talked to Heather about the notion of selling the enterprise, I think naturally for me and for all of us that already have enterprise teams, the exciting part is typically the deal size.

Being able to take, let’s say, a solution that you sell today, $ 25, 000, $ 50, 000 in ACV revenue, and being able to then land a multi- six- figure or a million- dollar deal, that’s obviously a huge part of any commercial team’s evolution.

One of the main topics that came up is not only when do you enter and invest in the enterprise, but also what should be ultimately the framework in which unifies an organization around the enterprise.

And I touched on earlier about the old adage of you hire a seasoned rep, you point them towards large clients, and that could be defined by size, market cap, market fit, and there’s this sort of enterprise through the lens of sales only. And that over time becomes increasingly challenging to scale and also will lend itself to breaking points within any fiscal year, especially when it comes to forecasting and being able to manage these large complex deals.

So one of the things that I wanted to dispel upfront, and again, this is my view, but hopefully this is shared, is this notion of the enterprise being exclusively about landing larger deals. That’s not the case. These are complex deals. They come with risk as much as they come with reward. And consensus is the common theme, both externally with the clients, but also internally.

And what I mean by that is in order to land a deal and support a deal and be able to retain deals over time, you need consensus internally about who’s playing what role within an enterprise sale, within that go- to- market motion. And then in turn, on the client side, you need to align with the buying committees that typically are associated with these large complex deals. The one definition I would say that is consistent is enterprise typically lends itself to custom.

Custom typically lends itself to making sacrifices on terms, on resourcing allocation, and all of those things. And if you don’t have that upfront and agreed upon going into the year, there can be some pitfalls, and I’ll go into that. I think the only other thing is just rigor. And obviously Invictus is built on rigor. The last summit, we talked about data and data hygiene and rigor around reporting and the like. It’s the same goes for enterprise.

Having a set structure, and there isn’t one way to do this, but having rigor around how you approach your enterprise market prospects, how you manage those deals, how you communicate and manage internally, really, really important. Again, the best salesperson in the world is not going to be able to single- handedly scale an enterprise sales team without structure around them. And we’ll get into that.

I touched on this earlier- but this notion of defining enterprise sales. We have tools out there today. I encourage everyone to plug this in google ChatGPT- but there’s no one clear definition and I don’t think that that is a bad thing by any means. I think again, enterprise typically lends itself to larger deals, but it could also. An enterprise sale to you all could mean landing a marquee name. That then opens up new sectors, new markets for you.

So the deal may not fit the margin profile that you’re seeking or you’re going after, but the doors that it opens by landing an enterprise client, a marquee name, a marquee brand, can really help you make markets, and so I just encourage my commercial leaders, as we’re entering any new markets in any given year, to just think openly about the why behind scaling the enterprise, and I think just having a keen understanding of you know why you would want to put added resources, to put added focus on. The enterprise should not be just tied to deal size.

There are many benefits for scaling an enterprise organization: for having this outbound motion to diversifying revenue again, for landing larger clients that you can multi- thread and grow with. That you can co- brand, that you can innovate new products together as a product partner. All of those things you know are beneficial. When it comes to enterprise, this slide is a wordy slide.

I think the focus of this is to say that there are, while there isn’t any true definition of enterprise, there are many fat words that are associated with an enterprise sale, and so I won’t go through all of this. But you can see, you know that there is a lot of stakeholders, both internally and externally. There’s a lot of risk factors, you know security and compliance.

You know there’s obviously ROI justifications, it’s a longer sales cycle, consensus building, executive sponsors- all of those things typically aren’t attributed to the transactional, more robust, traditional go- to- markets that I know many of you have scaled as you’ve got to, you know, to the points in your business’s life cycles.

I think that is a key piece here is that, when you put it down on a page, there are many, many factors that commonly go into not only scaling an enterprise sales team but also landing an enterprise sale, and having a keen understanding of all of those factors obviously improves- you know- rates of closing on a sale but also helps you mitigate risk, ie allocating too much resources forecasting enterprise sales that you think are going to close incorrectly, which then obviously can lead to you missing your revenue forecasts and, you know, having to look back on the year and say if we had only done this, only done that, which is timely as we enter into January.

There’s a bit of that going on in my world. So, again, fundamentally, looking at the enterprise sale through a lens of how we would characterize it, I think, regardless of whatever sector you’re in, regardless of how you define it from a deal size perspective, there is one common trait that I’ve observed in my experience in standing up enterprise sales teams, and that’s it all lends itself to value creation, typically tied to a broad enterprise problem at the client level, and any time you’re engaging with you know large clients.

I’ll use an example: Honeywell, Caterpillar. They’re complex organizations.

They have many, many stakeholders, very bureaucratic, the way that they make decisions is very bureaucratic, and so aligning a client around an enterprise problem that may not be naturally a transactional or common problem that you’re solving today with the solutions that you deliver to the market, but being a part of the conversation to really understand how that problem penetrates across an entire organization, that tends to be the tipping point of getting a client to the table, to want to entertain this notion of doing a large scale deal where you might be expanding your footprint within their organization, outside of your core competencies, but in turn, obviously assigning a large- you know- revenue or cost associated with that but in turn you’re tackling strategic business challenges for them which are going to be complex and are going to be lightly resourced.

heavy. I think another thing, and I mentioned this before, just consensus building. It’s not just understanding how clients buy today across an enterprise. It’s typically, you know, this is highly publicized, but there’s, you know, buying by committee. There are stakeholders who typically tend to be change adverse. That is all going to be common in any enterprise sale. It doesn’t matter what sector, what business.

And so being able to effectively bring a client to consensus is just as much of a, should be just as much of a focus as it is on negotiating deal terms. And what I mean by that is, you know, within any organization, within your own organizations, you have heads of finance, heads of marketing, heads of commercial, heads of product, ensuring that they’re paired and aligned with stakeholders across your target enterprise client base. Super, super important. You know, a CFO ideally on the client side would love to talk to a CFO on the, on the vendor side.

That is, that is pretty commonly known. They’re going to share both not in role and title, but also likely, you know, some, some similarities in terms of decision- making and risk profile. A CFO might be looking at things through, you know, revenue risk equally. A CFO at a portfolio company is going to be looking at things from revenue risk. It’s through a different lens.

And so what I’ve found is making sure that you multi- thread early in an organization, that you have internal alignment around, you know, which role each individual plays within a committee, you know, going to try and close these deals is vital, vitally important. And I think that can be lost again, as we look inward, we’re, we’re developing new products, we’re executing new marketing plans. There are all these things that are super, super important to kicking off a year strong and having a successful year.

But when it comes to the enterprise, expecting a sales professional to go out and, you know, originate and lead these independently, the outcomes are a lot less positive. And again, getting that buy- in internally, just as much as stakeholder alignment externally, super, super important. Another thing is just understanding the enterprise changes the shape of revenue, and that’s okay. Revenue diversification is what we’re all after over time.

But I think if you have a business built very much on transactional predictable revenue, making sure that you don’t break that cycle, break that, you know, if you have cyclical business, or if it’s moved over, you know, monthly cadence, having a, having a realization that you are going to have to go in and give a nine month, 12 month commitment for landing these deals, making sure that you understand that that creates more lumps in your revenue, that may not be what an executive team wants at any given time of, you know, your company’s evolution.

And I think getting buy- in early on around the expectations of longer sales cycles of, you know, the rates of return in terms of landing these deals, they typically are in the low, low teens. Obviously, if you have a healthy business, you’d hope for close rates above 20%, 25%. And so there just needs to be an internal recognition of that. And that’s something that I always strive to do early on, as we make hiring and just strategic go to market, you know, plans for the year.

And then the other one, Mark and I touched on this, but the notion of, you know, Diane with tier one targets, equally as important when it comes to the enterprise. It’s not a volume game. It’s about precision, about identifying who your ideal, you know, customer profile is. And then within that, how do you fit the mold for the enterprise? And ideally, it’s a client that is willing to partner with you and grow with you beyond just an out- of- the- box, you know, transaction.

And so I know that there are examples of that across the Invictus portfolio, where there’s large scale clients within the portfolios today that are helping beta test new products, you know, that are going to be partners as things cyclically change at any given time. And they’re long- term partners, that’s really, really important. And so being able to be hyper vigilant around what the profile of those clients are, precision way more important than going for larger scale volume.

And then the last one is just an engagement model that is customized to the business. I think we hear a lot about this today with, and I’ve touched on this before, with solutions like Gong. It’s really easy to do mass marketing, mass engagement across the market. And that’s great, that fits the purpose. But when it comes to the enterprise, really getting the attention of an enterprise prospect, it’s going to have to be customized, and that’s hard to scale.

And so just understand that the pre- sale motion, getting that messaging down, identifying enterprise problems that you might be able to help solve, understanding who the caster characters are across.

you know, their buying committee, understanding what’s relevant for their sector. That all takes a ton of time. The good news is there’s tools out there to help speed that along. On the last summit, I talked about leveraging textual analytics to inform targets. So if there’s a public company that you’re targeting and they have earnings calls, there’s a ton of great content in there to help identify potentially a problem that you could go and solve for a client. I’m gonna pause on this slide if that’s okay, Heather.

I’d love to just open up, see if anyone has any questions as we’re a couple of slides in, and I’m happy to go into any specific examples.

Yeah, if anyone has a question, please feel free to unmute and ask at any time. All right, the year is- I think we’re ready for examples.

Okay, that’s good, that’s good.

All right, well, I’ll start with a quick fact that I do like to seek external validation on some of the stuff that I’m preaching here. I think one of the biggest things is just the notion that clients are change averse, and just as much for the enterprise, you know, it’s about understanding that any change for them has to be shared by us as sellers, right? Ignoring the fact that, you know, change is hard. You know, I’m going through a merger, S& P acquired IHS Market three years ago as a $ 44 billion merger. We are still merging, that’s three years in.

We have finally integrated CRMs. We’re finally in 2026 integrating commercial teams. Change is really hard, and people are, you know, a change averse. And so when it comes to enterprise, really understanding that you’re not just there to convince them that your solutions are great, and that they’re gonna add a ton of value and ROI, that’s all great, but actually meeting them wherever they are in their journey in terms of transition and change, super, super important.

And there are ways that you can do that in an authentic way through the lens of collaboration and partnership that can have a real material impact on the outcomes of these enterprise engagements. So when you’re considering making the shift to the enterprise, you know, one I gave the example of with intelligence and acquisition we’ve just made at S& P, there should be a transition, a shift. It’s not just that you wake up the next day and you say, right, we’re gonna have an enterprise team and you just reallocate, you know, resources and talent.

You know, looking through the lens of why you should make the shift, I think there’s a couple of, or I’ve outlined four pillars, but there are a number of factors I think is really important to go through. So, you know, with larger deal sizes typically comes term concessions. And what I mean by that is you may have a standard three- year term that you license when it comes to your transactional business, or you might have an auto- renew clause that renews your client base into a two- year, you know, renewal term. Great.

When it comes to an enterprise sale, typically all of that level of detail commonly is gonna be negotiated by the client. So what I found over time is that it’s less about the dollar amount for these deals, and it’s all about the pain of change and the basically flexibility for the client in how they can both test you as an enterprise solution provider, but then also navigate and grow without being, you know, locked into something that they can’t expand with.

Meaning, if you’re a new enterprise solutions provider for a client, you know, they let you in the door, there’s obviously gonna be opportunity if you’re doing it right to grow. Well, how do you grow? How painful are those future discussions around renewal, around price increases? And all of that is gonna be negotiated upfront. And so you typically have to make concessions at the point of sale.

And I think just having a clear understanding as a collective across finance, across product, across commercial leadership on what type of concessions you’re willing to make before you go and attack enterprise, I think is really, really smart business. It speeds along the deal, but it also helps you manage risk internally. The other factor I talked about this is just more stakeholders.

So again, there are ways that you can speed up a deal to close and typically that’s, you know, reducing the turnaround between stakeholder questions and back and forth and getting alignment quicker across the various functions within your organization and the buying committee that you’re pairing up with.

or any time that you have more than one or two decision makers is going to be added complexity. So obviously understanding that that’s going to be represented in your forecasting, represented in deal length, deal cycles, super, super important. The other factor is risk. Again, it’s great to celebrate a million dollar deal, a half a million dollar deal, that’s great, but there’s risk that comes with this. There’s added resources across customer success, across operations, across finance.

It could be a custom invoicing that’s hard to manage because it represents custom versus standard. All of those things should be factored into wanting to pursue an enterprise deal. And I know that that’s challenging. I struggle with this myself because ultimately, I’m measured on revenue and revenue performance, but with the added risks and added resources, if that has a material impact on your BAU, that can actually sometimes have negative outcomes over the long term and growth of your business. And then the last one is greater scrutiny.

With any large scale client, they’re going to expect more and more from you, higher expectations. And so just being aware of how you serve and how you support those clients and understand what type of added scrutiny you’re going to have. In addition, from a financial standpoint, obviously Invictus is in the business of growing their portfolio companies. If you have too much weighting in a small concentration of clients, that could be risky. And so, again, all of these factors should go into decision making before you make the shift into enterprise.

On the topic of risk, these are potential pitfalls. These are things that I’m going through right now with Intelligence. So I’m responsible for our corporates business. That’s our non- financial corporates business. Their business is entirely focused on private equity VC client base. So their entire go to market motion is very much centered in the financial services. So the most obvious thing would be we’re building a go to market. Well, I want to hire people to go and attack the corporates market.

Well, right now they have no representation in the corporates market. They have no individuals that are focused on the corporates market. Well, hiring new individuals is good when it comes to standing up any go to market motion. But it can be troublesome when it comes to fitting or managing to a P& L and also meeting, especially for post exit earn out targets. And so I’m going through that right now. We’re saying we want to hire. There’s going to be resource and budget commitment to be able to do that.

But in turn, we have to then meet increased revenue expectations. And that’s going to stress the the mid market or the you know, the the BAU go to market motion that they have today. And so we’re tackling that through the lens of budget and P& L, not through the lens of of pipeline and sales, which is obviously the byproduct of standing up an enterprise team. The other side of this is executive buy in, which I’ll go into in a future slide.

But just understanding that any large scale deployment for this newly acquired company is going to involve their C- suite getting involved in these deals. Well, do they have the bandwidth? Do they have the time? What are their priorities for Q1, Q2 where we need to be on the road, you know, and drumming up an enterprise pipeline? So making sure that there’s full alignment there is super important. Another factor which I’ve touched on revenue forecasting, it creates a different revenue shape.

It certainly has a different, you know, KPI in terms of expectations for close and just making sure that you have full buy in internally. Super important scalability. Typically, this deal is a custom. So added resources, you know, a deal that could work with one client, say Broadcom may not work with another client. And so how much are you willing to stake into this enterprise motion, knowing that there’s going to be a lot of custom deployments that are associated typically with the enterprise? And then the last one is resource drain.

So let’s assume that the answer to all of these are we’re all bought in. We understand the pitfalls. We understand the risk. We feel like we have the resource to commit. We understand the importance of scaling the enterprise for future growth, for accelerating future growth.

The next big factor when you’re live is having a system. This is one system, it’s not the system that allows you to unify around a framework to keep everyone internally. This is just as much an internal stakeholder process as it is external around an enterprise sales cycle. I assume everyone’s aware of Medic. There’s various iterations of this. This is one system. It doesn’t have to be the operating system. It happens to be the operating system that I deploy.

And simplistically put, this is just a system, a checklist to keep everyone honest internally around the key factors that go into an enterprise sale. I don’t deploy Medic large scale across the more transactional side of my business. There’s components of it, which are critical. But when it comes to enterprise, in all of the deals that I’ve been involved in, Medic fits very, very cleanly into the buying process. And when we’ve lost a deal, it’s commonly because we’ve missed a step within Medic. So I won’t belabor this.

There’s a ton of content out there. There’s been other summits on this in the past. But I’m looking at Medic through the lens for today’s obviously summit, through the lens of an operating system. It’s also a sales framework. And I think it’s really, really important that you have a framework, whatever framework you choose, and you align people internally around that. Obviously, then you can measure it and that will boost forecast accuracy and win rates along the way.

Any questions on Medic in general and sort of viewing Medic through the lens of an operating system?

Mm- hmm.

Hi, James, Isaac’s here. Yeah, pretty familiar with Medic and MedPIC. I guess it’s cousin. Medic’s great for like the what you have to do, which is kind of listed on the screen there. It’s less helpful on how do I do it. I’ll just call it the day- to- day mechanical, tactical approach on sales. So how do you bridge? What’s the 60- second version of how you bridge from, this is the what, I need the metric so that it’s relevant to the customer, identify the pain, that’s the what. How do you get to the how you do it with your sales?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So from point of origination, I’m very committed to what we call the diagnostic approach, consultative sales. It’s all commonly adopted, I would say. But if I have a belief, and hopefully this is shared on the call, but the pain is gonna be your largest driver of an enterprise pipeline of interest, Medic isn’t good at identifying pain. Medic’s good, as you articulated, it’s a checklist approach. But what we teach our enterprise sales teams is not how Medic is going to build the pipe, or even this is the sole framework.

We’re really focused on really robust diagnostic selling techniques, which is centered around thematic, role- specific, function- specific discovery, which really puts the onus on how to run a great meeting, how to talk less, which I’ve joked with Heather about this.

I’m largely uncomfortable with these types of platforms, because if this was going the way I would want it, I would be doing no talking, and it would be some back and forth with Q& A. But the reality is that, yeah, the emphasis on the training is very much on diagnostic, is asking great questions, is being equipped with case studies, and industry- specific intel that gives you credibility in these conversations.

And then from there, how we’re deploying Medic, and again, it’s each to their own, but what we find is it’s keeping everyone honest to the necessary steps that it needed to take. But along that process, a seller should still be asking discovery questions throughout the entire process. So that’s generally the focus, is sellers should be in discovery mode always, even in a live deal cycle, constantly looking for blind spots. You can use discovery to do that.

But then the selling committee that is supporting your enterprise sales team, they should be very structured around Medic for a long time.

risk mitigation, basically, deal mitigation. Does that answer the question, James?

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

Any other questions before Jack continues? We also do have a great presentation by Paul Williamson that goes through all of the different sales systems that, not all, but many of the most commonly used and gets into some of the differences between them. So I encourage you to check out that content on Navigator as well for additional information on Medic as well as MedPIC and some of the others.

Yeah, I think I sat through that presentation. It was amazing, Heather. I think I remember asking you for the deck after the original presentation. Yeah, I think, just going back to James’ point, I think the landscape for sellers has changed. Obviously, AI is changing the way that we can connect the markets flooded with communication.

And I think going back to basics has been something that’s really benefited me and the teams that I lead in a sense that prioritizing human connection, being really inquisitive and curious, doing the research ahead of time when you reach out to a, you know, you might have a supply chain solution if you’re reaching out to a head of supply chain at Caterpillar, like understanding what type of issues that they’re facing. Is it tariffs? Is it trade wars that are impacting?

Is it FX rate exposures and risks due to production and having a global supply chain? All of those things don’t fit into Medic, right? So this notion of diagnostic discovery, really, really important. And then it allows also a seller to be able to embody and encompass the key discovery points for product, for product leadership, for finance, when it comes to negotiating deals too, that can all be, you know, identified within the discovery too.

And so, yeah, that would be where I would say I’ve spent the most time in terms of coaching is just really emphasizing the great questions matter and making sure that sellers are comfortable doing less talking. You know, asking better, more relatable questions and sort of, you know, holding space for clients to be able to work through and come to the realization that there is pain, there’s identified pain and that they need a partner to go and, you know, attack that.

Just quick question, Patrick, I know that you have a couple of questions that are in the chat. Did you want to address any of those now with Jack? Otherwise we can circle back around at the end to make sure that they’re all addressed.

Sorry, I’m flying blind on the chat.

So yeah, I think- It’s okay, that’s why I’m here, that’s why I’m here, Jack. Patrick, did you want to ask now? You’re on mute, Patrick, I’m sorry. Or we can’t hear you.

How about now? Sorry.

Yes, I can hear you. Go ahead. Yeah, do you want to ask one or all three questions now or we can address at the end?

I didn’t want to interrupt the flow, but I mean, they could all be very quick or they could all be very long. So maybe at the end, if there’s a cover.

All right, so Jack, we’ve got three questions from Patrick. We’ll circle back around at the end to make sure we get those addressed.

Perfect. We’ve only got a couple more slides and I’ll go through quickly. So again, I’d love to have open dialogue on this. So it’s a really basic one. I’m reiterating the point, ultimately enterprise decisions are going to be made by committee. And so to me, I define committee as a system and a system isn’t something that can be finessed, right? You need to, just like anything in life, you need to get consensus.

And the way to get consensus is alignment, not just on beliefs, but it’s also meeting them wherever they are in their journey with a client first, team first approach. And so again, I don’t think that you have to invest heavily in expensive sales talent to achieve and break into an enterprise market. And I say this as a seller, I do think you need to have a great system and commit to that system and alignment across the various functions within your organization. And then in turn, understand that you are selling to not an individual, but a system.

And therefore, be smart on how that system functions within the organization. And you can get to that through questioning. And Medic does touch on that. And Paul obviously touched on that too.

And then status quo, having gone for a three- year merger, would have been a lot easier if we just stayed two separate companies. That wasn’t the ask of investors. Status quo would have been great in that moment. But obviously for us to grow as a business, we need to integrate. Change is hard, it’s painful, costs never came up in any of this.

I think if someone had come and said, here’s a great technology solution that will integrate these two organizations at S& P and you’ll be in a great spot, we would have paid any dollar amount to get to that outcome. But yeah, status quo is your competition. It’s not just what you would commonly or traditionally view as a competitor success factors. Again, I’ll be super brief. I think the role of an enterprise seller is to orchestrate.

You need to be able to be great at tying everyone in internally, communicating internally, making sure that you’re having value- add meetings every step of the way, you’re not wasting people’s time. You’re constantly looking to cut that turnaround time, that back- and- forth the age- old adage that time kills all deals. As a seller, as an executive that’s trying to drive enterprise deals, there needs to be a real emphasis on orchestration and not showing up, pitching and just hoping that things will materialize. The next thing is multi- threading.

Again, if enterprise selling you’re selling to a system, you need to be able to multi- thread within that system early. That’s going to tell you a lot. Is there true interest? Is there buy- in? How far are you away from consensus? The last one is educate, and I don’t just mean traditionally. James asked a great question. I sort of equate that with: how do you stand up a sales team? How do you educate them? How do you prepare them to go and attack an enterprise market? Education is also on the client side.

So educating them on the pain that you’ve identified, but also the risk of staying in status quo, and all of that should feel very much like a consultative, educational motion. It shouldn’t feel like a pitch. And then the last one is obviously facilitate. I think you need a quarterback in any good enterprise motion and just understanding who plays each role or each individual role within that sales motion- super important. But making sure that you have a clear quarterback to steer things and move things along.

Hopefully this will resonate with folks on the call. I do think that having founder and executive alignment to the enterprise is critical. What that looks like for me is: we’ll open a calendar together and I’ll go to our chief product officers, our chief revenue officer and I’ll nail down time first that they can get on the road, and then it’s up to me and my team to come up with meaningful targets. But when I get an executive involved, I’m not looking at for them to do the job of a sales rep.

I’m looking at them to come in and provide credibility, to align with other executives, to show that we have a commitment to them as a company. We’ve brought out our CEO, we brought out our CFO. But also to mitigate risk- and I think one of the worst things that can happen to any sales leader is you spend nine months executing on a plan, you’ve had very little dialogue with your executive team.

You get to the end of Q3 with one quarter to go and you’re behind goal and you say: well, I’ve been really working hard, I’ve been spun up this enterprise team, we’ve hired five people.

If the results aren’t there, obviously that’s a negative outcome, not just for commercial but for the organization as a whole- and have an executive there to be able to be a sounding board, not just for when deals originated but also just validating the resource allocation, the go- to- market motion, being tied into that every step of the way, super, super important, and we’ve moved away from markets as a result of that where, from a seller’s perspective, I want to go chase this. I think there’s a great opportunity, but without executive alignment.

We don’t want to move away from our BAU go- to- market plans or we want to focus more on retention of our existing client base. Whatever cycle you’re in, ultimately the executive voice should be loud in that decision making.

I’ve touched on this, so I’ll be super quick. Go back to Medic, checklist, it can be a governance framework, really, really important. It also lends itself, and Mark and I touched on this in the last summit, data, going back to data, this should be an evidence- based go- to- market motion.

It’s great to talk about all of the massive targets that are out there in your respective markets, flush with cash, your competitors have landed a seven- figure deal, so we know there’s a market, but everything should be based on evidence, on KPIs that you’ve set across 30, 60, 90 days, and you should be able to progress against those metrics versus, obviously, optimism. And then the last thing is just leadership discipline.

I think, clearly, hopefully I’ve impressed this, but enterprise sales is a team sport, and so making sure that leadership across an organization is fully bought into that motion, and that there’s discipline around executing the system, the go- to- market framework, super, super important. And I find that, at times, there’s distractions, you could be launching a new product, you could be making an acquisition, you could be scaling your organizations in other areas.

There should still be a cadence in which you’re constantly touching back to the enterprise motion and strategy and tracking and reporting to make sure that you’re on track. This we’ll send out in the deck, but there’s lots of iterations of this, but this, to me, is how an executive team can play a part in making sure that not only your enterprise pipeline is real, it’s robust, but that you are looking at enterprise through the lens of disqualification. Again, optimism, or evidence versus optimism.

There are systematic checklists that you can go through to make sure that your efforts are progressing, that you’re creating the right kind of motion to get the end results that you’re after. And then the last one is, with anything, whether you’re piloting, standing up for a first time, I still preach this, that 90- day window, I think, is really, really important. You can learn a lot in 90 days.

Typically, 90 days for enterprise is gonna be largely origination as well as internal alignment, but making sure that you have clearly defined KPIs around what milestones you wanna achieve across that first 90 days. It’d be amazing if you close an enterprise deal within 90 days. Typically, that doesn’t happen. So really an emphasis on making sure that you’re staffing, you’re building that right framework, you’re implementing the right framework, and then you’ve got that feedback loop with your executive team, super, super important.

And I think that 90 days is a good window where you’re not leveraging your whole year, you’re not revisiting it in nine months to see if it’s working or not. And yeah, that’s something that I continue to preach today. And we’ll go through a new 90- day cycle this year as we integrate with intelligence. So that’s it for me, Heather. And I know we did have questions, Patrick, so I’d love to answer those. I know we’ll share the deck afterwards. Heather, I don’t know if there’s an opportunity to reshare the medic presentation as well.

Yeah, so actually already midway through our call, someone has requested access to it. So that medic presentation and Paul Williamson’s entire Guild Summit is actually available through the Navigator platform. So if you don’t know what Navigator is or don’t have access, please ping me and we’ll make sure that you get access or resend your credentials. But all of our Guild Summits recordings, those presentations are all available on the Navigator platform.

In addition to afterwards, this recording, this presentation, et cetera, will also be available through Navigator. So, but with that, Patrick, I’m gonna turn it over to you. I know you had three questions and then we also have another question from Balaji afterwards.

Yeah, can you hear me?

Yeah. Okay.

Quick, quick kind of random, but related questions. The first one was commissions and hand in sellers. They like simple commission plans, but I’m assuming you’ve got multiple products and multiple margin profiles. Do you sort of commission based on margin or revenue or how have you simplified that dilemma?

Yeah. So typically I’ve seen two approaches, but I would say that simple is best. And I think there is a cost associated with that. You mentioned margin, ultimately a seller is typically never compensated on margin. And so a lot of what I’ve seen works is you’ve got the fixed on target earnings model, which just says, let’s use made up numbers. I’m going to hire a seller making 125K in salary and their variable is 125K. So it’s one to one, their rate, their commission rates is just going to be backed in custom based on whatever targets you give them.

And the counter to that has been, well, it’s unfair if I’m getting a different commission rate than another seller. This is actually something that we’ve transitioned to in my company. So this is first hand. I’m experiencing this. But as an executive and as someone who’s scaling a commercial team, opportunity is the richest currency. So there may be custom commission rates in this first example I’m giving you, but it’s about the opportunity set that you’re prescribing and their ability to go above and into the accelerators.

So that’s one approach in terms of cost management. So fixed OTE approach and that will create custom commissions for everyone. Not my preference when you’re scaling teams, but that is one approach that I’ve seen. The other is just to collapse across products.

And one of the things that I think is a big thing for revenue profiles is incentivizing multi- year deals where, sure, you may get lower margin at point of sale on some of these solutions that you’re referencing, but over a three year term where you’re not paying commissions in the second, third year, you capture that back as well.

So definitely, again, I would recommend collapsing, having a simplified structure, understanding that that does involve different margin profiles, but then incent the behavior that you want, the terms that you want that would then over the long term allow you to build that base and hit those revenue growth numbers over time. And so in the case of the teams that I stand up, I put a huge emphasis on multi- year deals at the point of sale. Why? Because that de- risks us in future years and we’re not paying commissions on those subsequent years as well.

It makes sense.

The downside to custom commission rates, I will add, and I’ve been there because we have a service like a SaaS custom software arm, pays a different rate. Consulting pays a different rate. Typically, a seller will just focus on whatever the highest commission rate is. And that may not be the best outcome for you. Scaling, go to market motion.

You have to structure it the right way.

Yeah, yeah.

We just divide the sellers back end by their quota for their rate, if that makes sense.

But I think, yeah, so that’s what I’m doing right now. And that’s great. And so, again, I would just say that making sure that you’re setting goals effectively, which is a whole separate session. I’ve got a CFO right now who came from State Street and seems to love the fact of having a certain percentage of people not hitting goal. It’s not I’m not getting this direct feedback, but that seems to be the sense. I believe that you’re in the, you know, when a seller’s an accelerator, they’re going to sell more, they’re not going to sell less.

And so making sure that you have that right curve where you’ve got more sellers getting close to goal, you know, is way better for long term growth.

My third question, I’ll skip the second one for now, but to that kind of an obvious one. But I’m just kind of curious as to your thoughts, like larger sales organizations. I’ve got one hundred and twenty five people in leave of absence is like a death sentence for us. We’ve got 30 people on baby duty at any given time. And it’s just so difficult to manage that in combination of performance. Have you built any tools or structure or done anything to sort of help mitigate that? What I call sales capacity.

So you’ve got a hundred percent sort of bent strength and out in the market and selling.

Yeah, I’m a huge advocate of promoting within, but also tying functions that surround typically your sales organization and give them an opportunity to either grow their careers into a sales career, but also tie them closer for moments such as leave. So we have a sales associate team.

I call them an SDR team. Typically what we have in place is we have a rotation where if that’s an 18- month program and SDR comes in, we’re training them up, they’re at top of funnel prospecting, but then as they go through that six- month mark, 12- month mark, they become the natural bench. And on any given time, and you have a nice- sized team there, similar to the size of my team, you could have four or five people out. And so we have interim fixes where we’re then putting them onto the sales commission plans mid- year. We’re flexible in that regard.

We also have a tuck model where you’ll have two sellers on a territory, and that could be a junior seller and a senior seller. And so if someone then goes on leave, you’ve got an insurance policy there. The last thing is putting a SPF on your sellers to be able to juice their rates for selling into a territory. So we’re really fortunate at S& P. We have an amazing parental leave policy. You get six months full pay, and that’s great for the parent. And this includes commissions, by the way.

It’s great for the parent, less good for our clients and sales territories and coverage. And so what we’ll do is, in understanding that there is an incentive for that seller to exit at the highest possible rate they can before they go on leave, we will taper as soon as there’s notice that they’re going out on leave. It could be three months before. We make that immediate shift where we have two people attacking that territory.

And your existing team are gonna be thrilled because if you do it, at least the way that I do it, I’m not adjusting their territory. So they’re going into accelerators. They’ve got an expanded territory, and they’ve got a timestamp as to when they’re gonna lose that expanded territory. So that’s how I’ve approached it. It’s that junior bench, it’s the tuck model, and then it’s also SPIFs to allow your existing team to sell into that territory.

Makes a lot of sense. We’re deploying that junior model as we speak.

Yeah, I’m a huge proponent. We actually strike out more with external hires than we do promoting within. And so I think as much as you have the resource to do that, the tuck model is a really great way to do that. Yeah, and last simple question.

I’m just kind of curious as to your feedback. Constantly, I have one business that is small and we’re saying, no, you got to use our agreement, and it’s a data as a service business. How do you fight that battle?

Sorry, reiterate that.

How do you fight the battle of big customer says you got to use my contract?

Yes, yeah, we find this mostly in the technology space. Microsoft’s a great example. So we will entertain that depending on the deal size. I think that gives you leverage in the deal, but we will always require that they incorporate our agreements in their paperwork. So there is a happy medium. I mean, all of this is about risk profile, right? It’s how comfortable are you with signing paper versus them not signing yours. So we have not ever had a situation where we’ve just signed their paperwork and that’s that.

We can have their paperwork sat on top, but they need to sign our contract as an addendum. And that’s how we’ve satisfied the lawyers. I don’t know if that directly answers your question, but deal size is definitely the barometer. We won’t entertain doing that unless it’s of a certain size. And that’s actually in some cases, especially when it comes to enterprise sales, increase the contract value of a deal.

I mean, the takeaway here for me is your S& P is a fairly large brand and name, and you still sort of give in basically.

We get 100%, and the government, which is not the topic of conversation, we give in every time. They have the FAR clause. And if you read a government contract, they own all the cards, hold all the cards when it comes to enterprise sales.

Got it, thanks.

We’re at the top of the hour, Jack. So I know that some people are gonna have to drop off, but we have two other questions. If you don’t mind staying on, Jack, apology. And Justin, if you have time to stay on, we can address those questions and we’ll keep recording. Otherwise, we’ll have Jack follow up with you afterwards. But thank you guys for joining the Guild Summit. Anyone that has to drop.

Appreciate everyone’s time and happy new year to everyone. And I’m happy to stay on.

Okay, I think I just saw Jack drop. But Justin, do you wanna ask Jack your question?

Actually, if I can just ask a quick question.

Oh, there you are, Apology. Sorry, I missed you. Okay, go for it.

Yeah, thanks Heather, thanks Jack. I was just wondering, Jack, how you’ve used partners over the years in selling it to enterprises? Many times I’ve learned over the years is they become trusted advisors to the buying committee, to the buyers, their decision makers, et cetera. So how have you used them to co- sell with your sales teams, uncover new leads, those kinds of things?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I, you know, from experience, partnerships commonly fail, and so picking the right partnerships, I think, is really important. The one thing that we talked about incentives and commissions a few minutes ago, again, resources, understand you can’t just go and hire functions for every single go- to- market motion, but I do think having a separate commission plan and a separate focus for channel partners is really, really important.

For example, the best partnership for your business might be a co- build and then go- to- market that has RevShare on the back end. Well, typically we don’t commission at the same rate that we would commission at point of sale. Well, if I’m on a standard commission plan, going back to the conversation with Patrick earlier, I’m going to gravitate to wherever, as a seller, typically wherever I’m going to make the most money, and that much as you can, I think, identifying, and this could come from product.

I mean, I run our alliances team, and we have some really great commercially- minded product heads or product specialists that came, solutions architects that came out of the product org that are a great fit for this, and we typically base bonus them, and we’ll pay them on similar to like the assets under management model, so we’ll structure it that way. And then in terms of how we view partnerships, I think it’s critical.

I think, you know, in my industry, if you would look at data providers, information providers, I’d be asleep at the wheel if I didn’t think about Copilot, ChatGBT, there’s a whole host of, there’s a whole host of partners. We are partnering with those companies. There is no way that we can circumvent that. And so a lot of that motion is centered around typically the long- term view.

We’re not looking at this transactional intra- quarter, and the conversation has really been about structuring something that is less commercial in, you know, in conversation and more about market reach from a product standpoint. So I guess to answer your question head on, I believe that the best partnerships are driven by product and are compensated differently than your field sales organizations to keep that long- term view. Interesting. Okay, good. Thank you. Great.

Justin, are you still there?

Yeah.

Hi.

Do you want to ask Jack your question?

Yes, I’m still here. Great question, Balaji. Thank you for that. We have a lot of partner growth as well. I was curious about, Jack, what percent of new enterprise sellers that you guys are hiring, say, have some kind of non- recoverable draw component to their comp to help them get ramped?

Yeah. Great question. Typically, there’s a two- month draw. What I found is that if it’s a brand new function, we’ve had to extend that. And that’s been not something that’s been led by talent, by hiring, but more from asking them to do something difficult. It could be making a new market, could be taking a product that has zero sales and introducing it to the market. So that tends to be sales leader- led decisions and less on attracting top talent. But yeah, typically we’ll attribute a two- month standard draw.

For enterprise sellers, I think you have to be more open, knowing that it’s a longer sales cycle. And so some of the things that I’ve found to be effective instead of a draw, we’ll KPI them in the first two quarters of their time with the company.

And so you would take the OTE, you would back into that, and you would say, what great looks like for us as a company is that you are in the door for these top 50, top 100 enterprise target relationships, whether they come from Diane, whether they come from your leadership team, and then you’re paying them like a draw, but based off of hitting those milestones. And I think any ambitious seller is going to sign up for that, because they should believe in themselves that they’re going to execute on that.

So that’s the only thing that I’ve seen flip on its head, and we’ve deployed that pretty effectively too. So cashflow addresses cashflow, but you’re basically breaking down the enterprise sales cycle over the first two quarters of their onboarding with a heavy emphasis on them doing the right thing.

Thank you.

Are there other questions on the call for Jack?

Jack, you had mentioned early on, I think in the call that you were familiar with some tools that maybe pour over 10 Ks or annual reports to find pain to enable you to kind of better target, you know, an enterprise space. Can you tell me more about that? What were the tools that you’re speaking of? Yeah, I got caught up in this last time. Objectively as a Guild member, I won’t push SMP products, but Invictus is actually a client of Capital IQ. So Capital IQ is a information platform.

You might know Bloomberg Terminals, Facset, Refinitiv or LSEG, Thomson Financial. They’re all competitors in our space. I would say the most cost- efficient platform if you’re purely looking for textual analytics is AlphaSense. They are 100% a competitor. I’ve lost some former talent over there, but they don’t do what we do more broadly, which is around M& A, you know, financial modeling, they’re very targeted on textual analytics. But I’m in the platform every day and I’ll tell you in Capital IQ, but the same applies for these other platforms.

And you can get some of this from ChatGBT and other platforms, but it’s about keyword searching across essentially industry events, which we capture in real time, earnings calls, and being able to get, extract those fat words that ultimately you would build, you’re naturally, you’re marketing, you’ll go to market around, but then being able to do, and this is what Diane does really well, it’s scoring that and then bringing in additional targets that fit that similar profile. So we talked on the last summit about my team tracks executive changes.

If a new CFO comes in, I wanna go and talk to them in their first, you know, two months on the job about treasury solutions. Congrats on the new job. How’s everything going? Are you making any changes? You know, that’s the diagnostic questions that, you know, I think are timely. And typically when you look at how sales territories are stood up, it’s commonly rudimentary, right? It’s like revenue size, state that they belong. And so turn that on its head and it’s build your go to market, you know, by augmenting it with textual analytics.

And so we have a sustainability solution and it’s mostly for public markets. And anytime an executive is saying, you know, we’re committed to, you know, supply chain and cleaner supply chains and, you know, carbon neutral production, we can capture that. We’ve got alerts on that. And then we’re gonna target in, hey, you know, you just spoke about this being important to you. And that’s opened a lot of doors for us. Amazing. And that, again, that’s through, you say, Capital IQ, is that?

Capital IQ is a platform that my team offers, but I’ll plug like there’s other, there’s other more probably economically viable options. Alpha Sense is one that really is centered around textual analytics. You know, again, it typically sits alongside Capital IQ and it’s used as sort of an AI research agent. And you can keyword search, you know, I understand your business pretty well. There’s gonna be regulation, there’s gonna be compliance, there’s gonna be, you know, events, national events, breaches, things like that.

And you can keyword search on mass and see who’s citing that. That could be an analyst asking a client, hey, Home Depot, you had a breach, you know, and then suddenly the low CEO might be asked the same question. Are you concerned about, you know, cybersecurity because of Home Depot’s breach? And all of that is captured in textual analytics. You get alerts, and obviously that should be a trigger to reach out. Yeah, very good.

Thank you. Any other questions while we have Jack on the line? Oh, great. Thank you so much, Jack. Really appreciate your time as always and fabulous presentation clearly as evidenced by all of the questions as well. So again, kind of wrapping up, all of this content will be available via Navigator for download and review. Also, you’re able to contact Jack at any point in time. So his Invictus Growth email address is on Navigator as well as you can click a button and connect directly.

And I think I even saw a connection while we were on the phone, Jack. So somebody has already reached out to you through the platform. But anyway, great to see you all.

Yeah, thanks so much for your time, Heather. Thanks for the opportunity. And just, again, this isn’t, don’t just reach out just to talk about sales. From hiring, from tools, anything like that, I would love to help participate. I’m in the same, I’m in the trenches with you guys and a lot of the same issues, regardless of where you are in your company’s evolution, there’s a lot of commonalities. So I’m here, would love to connect and wish you all the best for a successful Q1.